VITAL
WEEKLY (NL) Some
two months I was in Greece to visit a baptizing party and part of the trip went
to the a Greek Orthodox Church up in some mountain. It was sunny and crowdy,
but today, in grey The Netherlands I play this new work by Francisco Lopez and
Ilios, which deals with field recordings they made together at various monasteries
in Greece and at Mount Athos and the rocky hills of Katounakia. I wonder if
we needed to know this (for me it's ok, because I remember that lovely sunny
day in September), because what do we actually know in relation to what we hear?
Much of Lopez' work deals with absolute sound, and there is no information to
be found on many of his releases, so that the listener is free to make up his
own mind. But even now we know, I strongly wonder what it helps. Both artists
went home with these sound sources and started creating each a piece of music
out of it. With highly processed large chunks of wind there is something austere
and stale about these recordings. I have no clue at all how these people work
with what they do, but in both pieces it all sounds highly fascinating. Ilios
is the man of some subtle and some abrupt changes, in which get turned around
and are put upside down, whereas Lopez makes a straight forward, slowly building
to a mighty crescendo piece (perhaps that should be called 'the classic Lopez
composition technique') until it collapses and remains silent for some time.
Both are masters of their trade, and this is no different (in various aspects
really) and shouldn't missed in any collection of a diehard. (FdW)

BAGATELLEN
(US) Derived from
field recordings made by both musicians at various monasteries in the area around
Mount Athos in Greece, each returned to his studio to craft a lengthy piece.
Ilios' seems to reflect large interior spaces, roomy but with sound echoing
back off of walls, birds chirping amongst the general thrum. There are several
rapid changes in character that occur with the abruptness of a door slamming
shut but generally it just exists in space, not too much different an experience,
I imagine, than if you'd been in the same areas, your ears well-attuned and
that's a good thing. There are birds aplenty at the start of Lopez' work, also
bees. It subsides into nothingness about a third of the way through, for several
minutes in fact, before emerging more electronicized, in more familiar Lopez
territory. This gives way to a windswept storm not unlike the AS11 disc which
builds to a climax for another third of the track before shutting off completely.
Unless something's occurring below the decibel level I'm able to hear, pure
silence occupies the last 12 or so minutes of the 36-minute piece.Brian Olenwick

VITAL.(NL)
If our man Lopez calls his latest work 'Untitled #150', it doesn't mean that
mean that there are 150 solo CDs out there, but still there is a vast amount
of solo work. It's hard to say if one needs 'Untitled #150', if one is mildly
interested in Lopez. Don't get me wrong: it's a very fine Lopezian work of treated
dead radio hiss and other static sounds in the usual inaudible fashion. These
days I play the work of Francisco Lopez from my computer. I copy the entire
CD to my harddisc and 'normalize' the whole thing (make the loudest point zero
DB). I know Lopez wouldn't mind me doing so, as he feels everybody should have
the oppurtunity to play his music one sees fitting well. Over the course of
these thirty-six some minutes various sections are to be noted with some dramatic
changes. As said this is indeed another strong work for Francisco Lopez, but
at the same time I must also note that the genre is fixed for him now. It will
not win him new fans, but please the die-hards all the same. Looking at my collection
of Lopez works, I think I can count as one of the die-hards. (FdW)

SOUND
PROJECTOR (UK) A short and perplexing minidisc here, resulting
from what may have been a fleeting encounter between the roaming Spaniard and
California-based sound artist Joe Colley. In spite of its extrme abstraction,
the work of Lopez never sounds
like the product of a man who lives in his studio. Rather, there is always this
"outdoor" quality to the music everything reflecting the glories of
breathing, waliking and living en plain air. This may be down to the source
material he uses (often field recordings), but it also tends to reflect the
semi mythical role that is starting to accrue around him: Lopez the voyager
like a young Odysseus, flying from coast to coast across a restless ocean, as
he ministers to his record label that has three international headquarters.
Creating music out of his meetings with people, turning the journeys and the
places into acoustic art. But importantly, he always takes the sounds back out
into the world, so they become a part of it again. I like the story about this
composition having its own "adventures" before it ends up in Lopez's
traveller bag. Silence, emptiness, dead air.. the void of nothingness. Water.
Then added layers of treated white noise. "Knowing when to not know"
becomes impossibly intense, loud and impenetrable - acquiring an aura of menace.
Everything fades away quickly leaving a lonely dissipated sound to blow away
helplessly across an empty wasteland. We're stranded in another tract of silence,
emptiness and dead air. Then, inexplicably a quiet muffled sound hovers in the
air - we can barely hear them but there are instruments, guitars, drums and
organ, a fourth rate funk band are playing throught the wrong end of the telescope,
dancing like tiny red ants on the antihill. The futility of man's endeavours
starts to weigh upon your shoulders. The CD ends abruptly. Finis. The brevity
of this composition has not prevented Lopez from realising yet another powerful
statement. Ed Pinsent

ANGBASE
(US) Two minutes of almost complete silence begin this track before a slight
electrical hum grows into a dense insect-like buzz accompanied by what sounds
like a steady rainfall. The density continues to grow into a claustrophobic
drone full of blurred masses of sound - a very carefully assembled collage of
noises and frequencies, mixing the field recorded sounds of rain and insects
with long sustained tones and digitally stretched sounds. The track falls back
into almost (but not quite) complete silence again at the 12 minute mark as
it coasts to the ending with a perplexing six minutes of silence. Extremely
good, and very listenable.

VITAL.(NL)
Francisco Lopez, who is besides an active solo composer, also somebody who collaborates
a lot, among others with John Duncan and Zbigniew Karkowski. Joe Colley might
not be a well-known name, but he's the man behind Crawl Unit, and that might
ring a few bells. The one piece here started out as a Lopez original which was
completed with Joe in California. About the first few minutes and the last few
minutes dabble around in Lopezian silence but the large chunk in the middle
is much more audible, and au contraire much of the Lopez music, more electronic
in nature. There is a lot of electronic sound processing going on over the original
set of environmental recordings. Quite a powerful result, which is a bit too
short for me.... A fine small disc. . frans de waard

PROSPECTIVE
(SF)Heres
a nice little disc with a collaboration between two great sound manipulators,
Francisco Lopez and Joe Colley, who might be more familiar to some as Crawl
Unit. This one track disc starts with the traditional Lopez -style silence with
some very minimal sounds in the background, slowly starting to develop and grow
into some stronger sound collage, often used by Crawl Unit. The sound collage
slowly builds up with some really low rumbling and high pitched frequencies
filling the soundscape. After a few minutes, the strong and louder passage returns
to where it originally came from and the piece ends with more of that Lopez
-style minimalism. This 3"CD is worth getting for the middle part of the
track alone, but still Id like to hear more collaborations between these
two. Jukka Mattila [9 / 10]

L'ENTREPOT
(BE) Third part in the Antifrost series lextreme sound souvenirs?. The recordings
from Lopez are worked out by both of them to very intense soundscapes.18 minutes
long where longs pieces of silences contrasted with a carefullybuilt up climax.
After 2 minutes 13 seconds we hear the first sound fragments. Surrounding sounds
from nature, dashing water, rain, windy soundsetc. escalated to a deafening
storm that lay down after 11 minutes. On 15minutes 30 seconds start we back
but with samples from snare instrumentswhere East and West seems to meet each
other.Intense strong soundscapes this 3" CD.

NEEDLEDROPS(US) Spain's Francisco Lopez
is best known for his early work exploring the limits of perception and the
grey area between audibility and silence. Of late, though, he's climbed the
wall of sound to gain a better vantage point over a sprawling landscape of full-spectrum
noise, both on his solo CDs (such as the sublime Untitled #104 for Alien8) and
in collaboration with Zbigniew Karkowski, John Duncan, Amy Denio and others.
On this 3" CD, Sacramento's Joe Colley contributes to an 18-minute piece
that crawls out of silence to ascend to a buzzing, dizzying peak before it quickly
fades back into nothingness. At its high point, a squall of white noise is rent
by arrows of feedback and threaded with ribbons of glistening tone, until the
air around you feels as though it bristled with light. Five minutes before it
ends, silence imposes a curfew, but a rebel faction breaks loose,brandishing
rattling percussion and snatches of radio fuzz in a soft cacophony of bebop,
lounge music and Hawaiian guitar, and the anonymous revelers carouse their way
through the darkness ? until they're shot dead with the abrupt end of the CD.
Philip Sherburne

INCURSION
(CA) This is the third installment in Antifrost's series of "extreme sound
souvenirs" on 3 inch disc (the first two in the series were by Sachiko
M and as11, respectively). This disc features an original composition by absolute
sound artist Francisco López which has been reworked in collaboration
with California based sound artist Joe Colley (aka Crawl Unit). Just under 20
minutes in length, the piece undergoes a series of dramatic, yet well paced
transitions. From the silence and near silence of what is so typical of López,
the sounds steadily begin to build on that foundation. The sounds of running
water are probably the only recognizable sounds here, as everything else seems
to be the result of some very heavy and multilayered processing. The sounds
intensify and swirl in motions that become increasingly more loud, and then
things slowly tailor off. leaving about five minutes in the piece. Subsequently,
a few more minutes of silence is followed by field recordings and found sounds
of some sort (some music playing in the background, movements and room ambience),
ending abruptly and processed at a very low volume so that the sounds are only
marginally recognizable. If not entirely engaging, it's a nice short record,
although it doesn't seem to tread much ground not already covered by López
in his solo work. Probably the least interesting in an otherwise excellent series
of 3 inch discs. Richard di Santo

FRIEND
OF THE DEVIL [UK]
This is part of Antifrost's 'Extreme Sound Souvenirs' 3" series and finds
the prolific Lopez allowing his track 'Knowing...' to be transformed into much
more by the sound artist Joe Colley. The familiar Lopez trademark of silence
gradually becoming loudness is an invigorating exercise in noise dynamics as
an electronic drone become submerged in the sound of creaking timbers and bass
rumble before minimalist static then silence once again enshrouds the violence.
At only 18 minutes, this does a lot by doing very little if you see what I mean.